Alex Archer - Restless Soul

Annja watched the water. It rose noticeably in the passing of a few heartbeats.

She cursed silently. When she started out that morning, it hadn’t crossed her mind that all the rain would affect her exploration of the caves. She should have considered the possibility. She should have realized there could be flash floods. Being on vacation had made her mind numb.

She glanced at the nearest coffin, then back at the water. The river could conceivably reach the coffins or perhaps completely cover them.

No doubt this chamber had flooded in the past what with the annual rainy season and the monsoons. Perhaps the rising river was the explanation for no bodies…the water had washed them away and left behind only the heavy teak coffins and the most cumbersome pieces of pottery. Maybe the water had even rearranged where the coffins had originally been placed.

She hadn’t imagined the voice. She heard it distinctly now. It hadn’t come from the coffins, though. It was as if it had traveled through the very stone of the cave and seeped into her head. It echoed like a child calling down into a canyon.

Free me…

Rogue Angel ™

www.mirabooks.co.uk

…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER. TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.

The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.

The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.

Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.

Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn….

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

Vietnam, July 1966

At first, he hadn’t minded the sound of the place.

He was Bronx born and raised, and the constant insect chorus of the Vietnam jungle was an interesting oddity and an almost welcome change from the frequent sirens and ever-present racket of traffic back home.

The birdsong, the swish of the big acacia leaves in the breeze and the occasional chatter of monkeys…it was all a pleasant diversion from orders barked by commanding officers and the grumbles of the men in his rifle company. He even liked the smell.

But that was more months ago than he cared to count.

Now the sounds blurred into a hellish cacophony that he had to pick through to listen for branches snapping, footfalls that weren’t from his men, the metallic click of machine guns and rifles ready to fire. Now the place reeked…of mud and rotting leaves, of things his imagination wasn’t vivid or brave enough to picture, and sometimes of decomposing bodies that neither side had retrieved.

Sergeant Gary Thomsen had learned to hate summer and the jungle. He hated the trails tangled with plants that grabbed at his heavy pack and all his weapons. He hated the sweat running down his face as plentiful as rain. He hated the fear twisting in his gut that someone was hiding around the next tree ready to kill him. He hated everything about Vietnam and the goddamn war that the politicians in the States wouldn’t call a war. A police action—was that the latest term?

He hated the leeches most of all.

He knew that they were clinging to him now. They were somehow always able to find their way up his pants and under his sleeves, into his boots, so they could gorge themselves on his sweet American blood. He’d led his men through brackish ponds and across streams and along a riverbank that morning and well into the afternoon, so there would be leeches on everyone.

He wanted to strip and pull the leeches off, but that would have to wait. There was another three hours or so left of what passed for daylight…the canopy was thick and not much sun was getting through. He had his orders to reach the firebase before dark and regroup with the rest of the platoon.

“Sarge…”

Gary scowled that someone had broken the relative silence. He turned to Private Wallem, a gangly hawk-nosed Texan who was pointing to just north of the trail. A body, mostly bones and scraps of dirty cloth, lay under a big fern.

“It’s one of theirs, Sarge. See? You can tell by the boots. Wonder if we got him or the jungle did? Guess it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s one of theirs and not…”

Gary shut out the rest of Wallem’s words and fixed his eyes on the body, angry with himself that he hadn’t spotted it. Not that it was all that interesting or all that important. But nothing used to get past him.

He’d set himself as point man for the patrol. The squad leader wasn’t supposed to walk point. He was supposed to take the second position. But Gary thought he had the keenest, most experienced eyes, and he wanted to be up front.

There was just too much green. He’d spent too many days in the jungle, and there were all those leeches, attached to his flesh, distracting him.

A good point man should have seen the body and not let anything distract him. What else had he missed? he wondered.

“War is always the same,” Gary thought, quoting President Lyndon Johnson. “It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.”

The quote had stayed with him because Gary was sure he was going mad.

Johnson had said the words six months earlier, back in January, shortly before Operation Masher, a large-scale search-and-destroy operation against North Vietnamese troop encampments, began. Johnson had then changed the name to Operation White Wing, which didn’t sound quite so aggressive.

Gary and his men were a part of it, in the Bong Son Plain near the coast. A little more than two hundred American soldiers had died, but almost six times that many North Vietnamese. Gary thought maybe he’d get to go home after it ended, but his sergeant was one of those Americans killed, and he was assigned another tour, promoted to E-5 and given his rifle squad of ten to lead.

The leeches would get some more of his sweet American blood.

“Leave it alone,” he said of the corpse. Sometimes the enemy rigged trip wires and explosives around bodies. “Keep moving,” he ordered.

He checked his compass. West, definitely. They were humping due west on an established trail. It took too much effort to hack straight through the jungle; everything grew too tight.

He’d look at the map again in another few minutes. They were hard to read, the maps. He navigated mostly by gut instinct and the compass.

He heard the steady tromp of the men behind him, the annoying but comforting buzz of insects. The insects rarely quieted. They didn’t seem to mind the presence of soldiers from either side. When they did go quiet, that was when fear seriously twisted in his gut.